Amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work.
Chuck Close

Monday, June 24, 2013

Stranger Visions: DNA Collected from Found Objects Used to Create 3D Portraits

You’re walking down a street in Brooklyn, gnawing on a piece of gum
that’s past the point of flavorful.. In a hurry, you spit it on the
ground without a second thought and continue about your day. Hours
later, a mysterious woman arrives, surreptitiously collecting the sticky
gum from the sidewalk and dropping it into a clear plastic bag which
she then carefully labels. Flash forward a month later: you’re walking
through an art gallery, and there, mounted on the wall, is a familiar
face staring back at you. Astonishingly (or terrifyingly), it’s a 3D
print of your face generated from the DNA you left behind on that random
piece of gum that now appears in a petri dish just below the portrait. A
few years ago this would have seemed like science fiction, the stuff of
films like Gattaca, but to information artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg, it’s how she makes her artwork here in 2013.
They say inspiration can strike anywhere. For Dewey-Hagborg, it
happened in a therapy session. While staring at a framed print on the
wall, she fixated on a tiny crack in the glass into which a small hair
had become lodged. As her mind wandered, she imagined who this seemingly
insignificant hair belonged to, and, more specifically, what they might
look like. After that day, she became keenly aware of the genetic trail
left by every person in their daily life, and began to question what
physical characteristics could be identified through the DNA left behind
on a piece of gum or cigarette butt.

Stranger Visions
is the result of her fascinating, if slightly disconcerting, line of
questioning and experimentation: 3D printed portraits based on DNA
samples taken from objects found on the streets of Brooklyn.
Dewey-Hagborg worked with a DIY biology lab called Genspace, where she met a number of biologists who taught her everything she now knows about molecular biology and DNA. Via an interview with the artist:

So I extract the DNA in the lab and then I amplify
certain regions of it using a technique called PCR – Polymerase Chain
Reaction. This allows me to study certain regions of the genome that
tend to vary person to person, what are called SNPs or Single Nucleotide
Polymorphisms.
I send the results of my PCR reactions off to a lab for sequencing
and what I get back are basically text files filled with sequences of
As, Ts, Cs, and Gs, the nucleotides that compose DNA. I align these
using a bioinformatics program and determine what allele is present for a
particular SNP on each sample.
Then I feed this information into a custom computer program I wrote
which takes all these values which code for physical genetic traits and
parameterizes a 3d model of a face to represent them. For example
gender, ancestry, eye color, hair color, freckles, lighter or darker
skin, and certain facial features like nose width and distance between
eyes are some of the features I am in the process of studying.
I add some finishing touches to the model in 3d software and then
export it for printing on a 3d printer. I use a Zcorp printer which
prints in full color using a powder type material, kind of like sand and
glue.

The resulting portraits are bizarre approximations of anonymous
people who unknowingly left their genetic material on a random city
street. So how accurate are the faces created from this genetic
experiment? The artist likes to say they have a “family resemblance” and
no, unlike the scenario depicted above, a person has never recognized
themselves in any of her exhibitions. Yet. There are some things such as
age which are virtually impossible to determine from DNA alone, so
Dewey-Hagborg casts each portrait as if the person were around 25 years
old.

Dewey-Hagborg will be giving a talk with a pop-up exhibit at Genspace on June 13th, and QF Gallery on Long Island will host a body of her work from June 29th through July 13th. You can follow the artist via her website and also her blog. All imagery courtesy the artist. (via smithsonian)

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welcome to my life

Being a painter is not a choice. It is not a chosen
profession. Painting is a compulsion. It is a need like breathing or eating. If
fact it regularly supersedes both. There is no choice in whether or not I will
paint only the when and often not even that. Away from the studio I think about
the canvas that sits there unfinished, calling to me, challenging me, maddening
me.